When we were young(er), our parents didn’t understand us (and obviously vice-versa) and our obsessions, just as we and our own children don’t understand each other these days. But back then there was a lot less to misunderstand. Nowadays our children have technology to help them confuse us, and boy are they doing a great job of it! There’s Skype, iPods, broadband, ISPs, Blogs and Myspace, megapixels... digital... and what is HD TV?

Then just when you thought you’d got the hang of mobile phones, your children are buying 3G phones that will apparently allow them to watch Dr Who on them. And it has to have something called a blue tooth. The only comfort in all of this is to realise that our children will be even more baffled by their children than we are now. Meanwhile, here is a small selection of Things You Need To Know in order to at least pretend you are keeping up.

The Internet

OK, you may think you have a handle on this one already, but you may not know the basics. The Internet was invented during the days of the Cold War to allow the American military to stay in contact even if half the country had been nuked.

They developed a system whereby there isn’t just one route from, say, New York to San Francisco. Instead, they linked New York to all the nearby cities. Then each of those cities to all their nearby cities, and so on. So eventually all the cities are linked together by what looks remarkably like a spider’s web (you may see where this one is going already).

An electronic message sent from New York to San Francisco would be split up into many packets, each packet having the San Francisco address on it, but with the freedom to choose any route it liked – so the first might go via Chicago, the second via Houston and so on. The packets are numbered and reassembled in the correct order when they reach San Francisco to allow the message to be read.

So the Internet itself is just the wires linking everyone to everyone else via their computers, like the wires that make up the National Grid. Then, over those Internet wires run various systems like the World Wide Web, email and so on. No one owns the Internet: it’s a co-operative effort with everyone linking to everyone else and paying for their own costs as they go.

ISP

Your Internet Service Provider, such as AOL, BT, Tiscali or Tesco, provides a link from your home computer to the Internet via their own computer systems and allow you to connect to other computers connected to the Internet anywhere in the world by other ISPs.

Bandwidth

The capacity of your connection to your ISP (and then their connection out to the Internet from their computers) is expressed in terms of Kbps (thousands of bits per second) or Mbps (millions of bits per second). A ‘broadband’ connection is one half megabit (512,000 bits) or more. A bit is just that – a single bit of information, the basic unit with which your computer deals. It’s either 1 or 0, On or Off. A byte is a computer ‘word’ of 8 bits, which looks something like 10010101.

Digital

The digital world is made up of bits and bytes. Our world, the one where you can touch your computer or curse your satellite box, is the analogue world. The digital world ‘samples’ the real world – a digital music file (and this includes CDs and MP3 music) is made up of ‘samples’ of the sound heard, taken many thousands of times per second.

To the human ear the original musical sound and the digital, sampled music file may sound the same (or at least very similar), but the digital file doesn’t record all the sound it hears – just what it hears a few thousand times every second, strung together to fool your ear and brain into thinking you’re hearing a continuous sound. This process allows the sound to be stored on a computer in bits and bytes, 1s and 0s.

Skype

OK, let’s start with some bad news – Skype comes with an acronym, VOIP. Which means Voice Over Internet Protocol, a voice system that runs over those Internet wires, a way to digitise your voice into 1s and 0s, split that up into packets and reassemble it at the other end into a semblance of what you were saying. This is even harder than it sounds: those packets going over the Internet can arrive in any order, which doesn’t matter if you’re downloading a picture and can wait until it’s all arrived to see it. But we expect voices to be coherent and the start of a sentence to arrive before the end, so Skype has to do some clever stuff to make sure you hear things in the order you expect.

Skype is a way of making cheap telephone calls to and from your computer. You can call from your computer to an ordinary telephone (a service for which you pay in advance and the calls are usually much, much cheaper than ‘regular’ phone calls), or from an ordinary telephone to someone else’s Skype-enabled computer. To make calls from your computer you need speakers and a microphone, or a headset with microphone; or there are now many telephone handsets that work with Skype by just plugging them into your computer.